In the spring and summer of 1903, anti-Baha’i riots flared across several cities in Persia. They began in March in the northern city of Rasht, erupted most violently in May in Isfahan and in June and July in Yazd and its surrounding towns, followed by a number of other cities to a lesser degree. Mobs instigated by clerics ferociously murdered many of their fellow citizens, raiding their homes and plundering their properties. In terms of the loss of human life, this was the largest and most sweeping anti-Baha’i pogrom in the twentieth century. Approximately two hundred people were killed and homes of many more were looted. Abd al-Husayn Avarah, a historian contemporary to the events, described them as a “labyrinth” perplexing anyone trying to understand their real causes which, in his assessment, were political. Previous scholarship on the topic, focusing on the events of Isfahan, has analyzed them mainly in the context of the socio-politic and socio-economic relations in the city and province. Analyzing a wide array of primary sources such as governmental telegrams between Tehran, Isfahan and Yazd, memoirs of the eyewitnesses of the events, and consular reports, this paper argues that the anti-Baha’i pogrom had causes going beyond the local and provincial. It puts the scapegoating pogrom in the context of the actions taken by the political opponents of Amin al-Sultan, among both clerics and governmental officials, to add to the overwhelming chaos in the country, in order to force the prime minister to resign, a goal attained in September 1903. The most powerful and the most fierce of the then Russophile Amin al-Sultan’s enemies was the Anglophile Mas‘ud Mirza Zill al-Sultan, the eldest son of the Shah and the governor of Isfahan, who was unhappy with the establishment of a Russian consulate in Isfahan and the central government’s Russian loans of which Amin al-Sultan was the main protagonist. Zill al-Sultan was known for having instigated the Isfahan religious leaders to foment trouble in the city when it suited his current policy. Such facts explain why the most intense massacres and raids happened in Isfahan and also Yazd, which at the time was governed by Zill al-Sultan’s son. They also put the pogrom in the larger context of the rivalry between Russia and Britain in Iran in the years preceding the 1907 entente.